Inspirational Quotations by Honore de Balzac (French Novelist)

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was a prolific French novelist and playwright. He is sometimes called “the Shakespeare of the novel.”

Born in Tours, France, Balzac studied law and worked in a law office in Paris for three years before embarking on a career as a writer. By age 29, Balzac had no success as a writer. He also failed in a number of business ventures and was deeply in debt for much of his life. To keep ahead of his creditors, he worked feverishly. He napped often and wrote 14 hours a day, sustaining himself with massive amounts of pipe tobacco, food, and innumerable cups of strong black coffee. It is estimated that he consumed some 50,000 cups of coffee during his lifetime—something that probably contributed to his death.

Between 1830 and 1832, Balzac published Scènes de la Vie privée (Scenes from Private Life,) a series of six novelettes that finally brought him literary attention. In 1833, Balzac came to a decision to redefine the scope and the structure of his novels so that his distinct books would become chapters in an ever-expanding fictional universe. Balzac opted to pull his old and new novels together through recurring characters and themes and present a cohesive picture of French life. He called this project La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy.) By the end of his life, The Human Comedy incorporated over 90 novels and novellas, and included over 2,000 identified characters.

No novelist wrote as many good novels as Balzac. He gained notoriety as a printer’s nightmare. He frequently rewrote and recast his novels from printer’s proofs, at great expense to himself.

Balzac’s vivacity, as well as his innovative paradigm of what the novel and the novelist can do to portray human and social experience in all its complexity, make him one of the most influential celebrities in the history of fiction.

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